


Whenever I Breathe Out

by all_these_ghosts



Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 09:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3483875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherever they walk, Marian's ghost walks with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whenever I Breathe Out

**Author's Note:**

> This will be the only time that I acknowledge what happened in 2x13. I have spent many happy years in denial, and they will continue after I post this, and I will never think on it again.

He no longer wakes on his own.

Much has known Robin his entire life, and Robin has always been a terrible sleeper. A few hours here, a few hours there. He’d wake in the middle of the night to write or do sums or just prowl around the village, aimless in the dark. Later, in the forest, Much had wondered if his old master slept at all. He was always the last to bed and the first to rise with their day already planned.

No longer.

Now, he and John and Allan wait as long as they can each morning before shaking Robin awake. After the first morning, when Robin had pulled a knife from his waistband and pressed it to Much's throat, they told him he couldn't sleep armed.

Robin didn't even argue.

He doesn't speak much at all anymore. The days are long, and though Much does what he can to fill the long silences, nothing can replace what they have lost. Marian's ghost walks with them, all the way down the long road to Nottingham.

-

In dreams she comes to him, dark curls loose around her face. In dreams she offers herself to him, teases fingertips beneath the hem of his shirt. "Haven't we waited long enough?" she whispers, her lips against his ear and her hands moving, moving. His entire body clenches and releases when she touches his bare skin. Everything is sparks and pleasure and agony, because even as she’s undressing him he knows.

“Marian,” he breathes. His mouth forms the shape of her name but no sound comes out, only air, and he moves his hands from her hips up to the curve of her waist.

“Don’t, Robin.” Her hands move to cover his right hand. To cover the blood that’s staining through her dress, seeping through their entwined fingers. It pools on the stone of the plaza. Perfect crimson. Even her blood is beautiful. She looks up at him, her eyes blue and bloodshot. “See?” she whispers. “I told you.”

He calls for Djaq, or he thinks he does, but Marian collapses in his arms, and he cannot stop the blood, he cannot stop the blood, and he lays her down and he screams, and screams.

And her body lies beneath the ground now, her lips and her eyes and her long perfect fingers rotting, and even though she's dead and buried her voice keeps ricocheting through his skull, sweet and sad and low. He is desperate to know what she says, but the only thing he can make out is his name.


End file.
